


I'll be your new religion

by mollivanders



Category: Being Human (UK)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Death, F/M, Gen, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-18
Updated: 2013-06-18
Packaged: 2017-12-15 08:45:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/847568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mollivanders/pseuds/mollivanders
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And after all, Hal reminds himself, it’s not like anybody’s <i>died</i> yet. Perhaps it was enough, to be human for a short while all those years ago. Perhaps it cured him. Alex doesn’t protest, but she does study him. Her gaze is careful and guarded, and when he pulls away, shaking with bloodlust, she brushes his hair out of his eyes.</p><p>“Promise me something, Hal,” she says seriously, and the din of the city festival falls away in the wake of her voice.</p><p>“Promise,” he answers, his voice a soft purr, and kisses her, blatant and wanton as his victim lies gasping at their feet.</p><p>“I’ll tell you later,” she says, breaking away, and she takes his hand and leads him through the crowd.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll be your new religion

**Author's Note:**

> **Title: I'll be your new religion**  
>  Fandom: Being Human  
> Rating: PG-13  
> Characters: Hal/Alex, Tom/Allison  
> Author's Note: Word Count – 2,871. Set Post-S5, so beware spoilers. This got very dark, because it's a show about vampires and ghosts, I guess. Trigger warnings for depression and suicide. Also, I went with Alex's new outfit from the S5 DVD scene and let her ditch the shoes. Authorial privilege and all that; call it a mood change.  
> Disclaimer: The characters belong to the BBC, as always.

The world doesn’t end with a bang.

The world doesn’t end at all.

But as the years between the Devil’s fall and the present stretch on – stretch thin – Hal has trouble convincing them that this is what supernatural life _is_.

“I lived like this for fifty-five years,” he reminds them, and Tom gives him a long-suffering stare while Alex swings her legs off the table and leaves the room in a huff.

(Living day to day, it seems, is horribly dull stuff.)

And for a long time, there are no Old Ones; no Devils and no Herricks. The world is washed clean and they three are left in peace, as though the universe has once again given them the afternoon off.

(A clean surface, he has found, has always invited trouble.)

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the world around them shifts. For one thing, Tom grows up. While he lives forever as Peter Pan in Hal’s mind, the universe has other plans. After a few months of peace and quiet, Tom moves in with Allison and out from the little B&B haunted by dead things.

“Take care,” Hal says as they leave, but Alex is quiet from her perch on the kitchen bar. Her bare feet are linked at the ankles but she’s still as a statue when Hal turns around.

“Think he’ll come back?” she asks after Hal shuts the door and he shrugs.

“No, I don’t,” he says.

But the house is too quiet with just the two of them and perhaps to spite him, Alex comes back one day with Allison and Tom in tow. “Friends take care of friends,” she says when Hal sees them, and though he’s not about to protest, a thousand warnings fill his mind. Stories Annie told him, of how the dynamics change in a house of four, a house with secrets and romance. A sort of necessity, she’d said, had crept up on them; a sense that it was them against the world, instead of part of it.

It had destroyed them all, in the end.

He mentions it to Alex once, offhand and casual, that a little attempt at _living_ might bring hell knocking on their door again.

“Don’t be silly, Hal,” she says. “There’s no such thing as hell.”

In her defense, she does seem to be right. An echo of life comes back into the house with Tom and Allison there, one that Hal and Alex couldn’t relax enough to allow on their own. She pops out to Scotland every now and again, to see her brothers and dad, and she always comes home in the end.

For a while, Hal stops worrying. He accepts the new rhythm of things, as Leo taught him. It’s enough, in the end, to make him drop his guard.

“I should get a job,” Alex says one night, her feet resting on Hal’s lap. She’s flipping through the stations on the telly and he’s trying to read _War and Peace_ for the third time, in vain.

“And what would you do?” he asks, absently turning the page. He feels her arch back against the couch, stretching like a cat as she looks through the ceiling. “Have you forgotten that nobody can see you?”

“Nobody,” she hums.

But even if nobody can hear her, they can hear her shadow. It glances off walls, echoes in the ears of the living, and a disembodied laugh can sometimes be heard if the mortal is listening very, _very_ closely. So she takes up music again. She plays the piano at the house; she plays empty pianos at restaurants and high fashion clothing stores; she accompanies orchestras when she thinks the piece can be improved upon, and sometimes (often), Hal comes to see her. He stays in the corner, drinking a careful portion of alcohol, testing his boundaries as she tests hers.

(They did so well, both of them, as humans, after all.)

She stops visiting her brothers and father as much – stops watching her brothers grow up without her and stops watching her father drink himself to death – just plays and plays on. There’s a manic edge to it all that frays Hal at the edges, and makes him drink more. When she comes back from one of her ever rarer visits home and softly informs Hal and Tom that her father is dead, they follow her up to one of the empty rooms where she tries to cry herself to sleep.

Ghosts cannot sleep, but they keep watch anyway.

(Somehow, she tells them later, the worst part is: she missed him on the way to his door.)

They stopped marking time a while ago, but after Alex’s father dies, Hal does something he hates himself for. He sees Tom and Allison aging, slowly but surely. He sees the way Alex stares blankly at walls like she’s waiting for a door to materialize and well, he’s selfish. He’s a coward.

(He doesn’t want her to go.)

He’s also the only one brave enough to do it, so he pulls Alex into the garden one afternoon to ask if maybe – perhaps – well if she’d be interested in getting away for a while? He would be interested in that.

“I thought we could get some peace and quiet,” he says softly, because she’s painfully close to him and despite the warm summer day at their backs, he shivers from the cold. She stares at him, a hint of defiance in her empty stare, and bites her lip.

“Hal, there’s no such thing as peace,” she whispers, like a secret. “Not for us.” Her hand curls around his wrist and pulls him closer. “We haunt, we linger, but we don’t get to move on.” 

(His edges are quite ragged these days.)

He snaps, tugs her close by her waist and drinks in her sharp gasp – feels more alive than he has in years. “Then why wait?” he asks in her ear, staring past her at the highway, the horizon, and beyond. “Let’s do something instead. Go somewhere. It doesn’t matter where, we’ll just do it. Visit Paris, Vienna, the whole world. ” Her body sparks against him, an echo from a memory of what real contact was like.

It’s enough of an answer for them both.

“I know you don’t want to stay here,” he continues, dropping his gaze to her eyes. Anxiety worries at his edges, but not for her. He can feel her coming alive under his hands and knows that he has the power to work this spell over and over; knows that she knows it too. “I just don’t want you staying for the wrong reasons.” Alex laughs, a childish sound that grips at his chest and forces a dusty memory from their past into their present.

_”I’m really dead, aren’t I?”_

“And what are those?” she asks, stepping away from him and shaking him into reality again.

(The monster settles, for now, content with premonition.)

She takes to haunting the club where she died, which at first Hal takes as a good sign. He thinks, foolishly, that she is trying to resolve her death. There’s no more music in the house, but after the club can’t keep a DJ for more than a week the managers actually call in an exorcist. Alex slips into his bed that night, her cold feet waking him in an instant, and curls her arm across his chest.

“They’re going to send me away, Hal,” she whispers and in the darkness, he catches a glimpse of their future here today. History repeating itself; another vampire and another dead girl. “What do you think that’ll be like?”

He doesn’t really think about it.

They leave in the night, with just the clothes on their backs and the money in his wallet. She wanted to leave a note for Tom and Allison; he insisted on calling from a pay phone. There’s an urgency to his steps that pushes them on and he knows that there are dangers both real and imagined at their heels. If she picks up on his mood, she doesn’t bring it up. That first night, Alex is all silence, staring out at the country as they travel, and Hal takes steady, even breaths.

(The monster stretches lazily within.)

She won’t go north, to the wilds of her Scotland home, so they go south. Hal takes her to Paris and after a while, he thinks they’ll stay there a while. The empty, foreclosed buildings don’t offer much shelter though and they spend most of their time in clubs, dancing in time to the popular beat of the day.

After his wallet empties, they spend a few days wandering the city, garnering strange looks as Hal talks to himself, Alex’s arm twined with his. It’s in an empty park, near midnight, that she suggests it. He doesn’t need anything to live – doesn’t need to live at all, in fact – but in this foreign air Alex has a thousand thoughts that just swim off her tongue. They lap in the air, and tempt him with possibility. Swim naked in the Seine. Break into the Louvre. Drink blood, just a little – or maybe that one’s just him. Even still, she seems better. Alive, almost, for the first time in years.

(It was his fault, in the end, for mistaking alive for human.)

“Is this how you were when you were Lord Harry?” she asks, her head cradled in the grass. The stars are blurred, Paris’ lights outshining them by far, and Hal longs for a cigarette. “No,” he says absently. “I lived much better then.”

She doesn’t correct him.

They hop from city to city and if anyone does see them, they don’t dare approach them. It’s just an indulgence here and there, and Alex watches while he does it. He walks the dirty streets of urban Europe with Alex at his side, her tattered jeans and jacket a stark contrast to his fresh-pressed suits and shining boots. To anyone who can see, her bare feet skip along the pavement, and Hal keeps a mental beat of her time.

(Together, they make not a sound.)

And after all, Hal reminds himself, it’s not like anybody’s _died_ yet. Perhaps it was enough, to be human for a short while all those years ago. Perhaps it cured him. Alex doesn’t protest, but she does study him. Her gaze is careful and guarded, and when he pulls away, shaking with bloodlust, she brushes his hair out of his eyes.

“Promise me something, Hal,” she says seriously, and the din of the city festival falls away in the wake of her voice.

“Promise,” he answers, his voice a soft purr, and kisses her, blatant and wanton as his victim lies gasping at their feet.

“I’ll tell you later,” she says, breaking away, and she takes his hand and leads him through the crowd.

(First there was Lady Mary. Then there was Leo. Alex, he thinks, is the best knight to his damsel; the best of them all.)

It’s a summer night in Vienna when he writes to Tom and Allison; asks how they are. He doesn’t think about how lucky he is that Tom is half a continent away, where he cannot see the destruction his friends are waking. He just writes and writes and puts the letter in the post without a thought. He and Alex go out to an opera that night, drinking in the rich music and the old city, and that is the last night they are Hal and Alex, Alex and Hal.

The post comes back to their hotel room, unopened and marked as _Return to Sender_ , and when Alex bypasses him to search for Tom and Allison McNair on the internet, her sharp gasp is all he needs to understand.

The racking sobs that won’t come out shake his body and Alex takes him, carries him to their bed, and as though from a great distance he hears her singing a sad lullaby, over and over and over again. He gives into the slumber and wakes to a rude knock on the door. He is disheveled at best, unfit for any company, but before he answers the door Alex appears at his back. “I called for them,” she says and when he turns to face her, he is more frightened by the clarity in her eyes than anything else they’ve seen or survived. Her body is molded against his, and when she kisses him he can taste the blood on her lips.

“It’s alright,” she tells him. “Promise me.”

(It’s really not.)

“Promise,” he says.

The luckless souls they leave in their bloodstained hotel room are followed by an outburst of rage directed at a small boy walking home from school, followed by some drunken enlisted men. _Please_ , they all beg, their sightless eyes staring straight through Alex, who watches him work and doesn’t say a word. They run down the Italian coast until he stops killing, seek refuge on the outskirts of a small fishing town where Hal catches his breath in deep gulps. His clean suit is ruined and Alex’s hands are steeped in blood, but her eyes are full clear, while now his are not.

“It’s alright,” she tells him again, wiping at his jaw with a damp torn cloth. “We can have some peace now.”

(He thinks, just maybe, she was right the first time.)

The next morning he wakes in a small fishing boat to find Alex flickering next to him. It’s a long moment before understanding hits him like a wave, and he reaches for her, but she’s less solid than she’s ever been.

“Alex,” he begs, his voice hoarse with sin, and she smiles wearily at him.

(They’ve run _so far_.)

“Perhaps we should go home,” she suggests quietly.

He doesn’t have the strength to argue, or protest, or beg to be put in chains. There is no room for fear or any of that; not now. There is only the conviction that they must get her home, get them both back to that bed and breakfast and wait, in sanctum. The further they run, though, the closer he can feel the monster at his heels; close enough to bite, and a terrible, easy thought forms in his mind.

If she goes, then Hal must go with her.

(And Lord Harry must stay.)

They book passage on a train headed north, an express up to the French coast, and sometimes in the dark he can almost see an old woman, dusty and thin, under the ghost of the young woman. She grips his hand in the gloom, a frail outline against the majestic landscape behind them, and he knows that she knows his thoughts.

(Perhaps, has even known this all along.)

“Promise me, Hal,” she says firmly as the French coast comes into sight, her outline crackling with static, and he grips her hand as tight as he can. “Promise me this is the end.”

She has wanted this for so long, he realizes. She of all people knew better than to ask for the killing to stop; she does not ask for a miracle, just a last favor for his knight in wasted armor.

(If she is gone, then he must go with her.)

“I promise,” he says, and her hand burns against his.

They make it back to the old bed and breakfast, though it is boarded up and a condemned notice hangs tipsily on the front door. The once-cheerful paint is peeling and blearily Hal wonders just how long they’ve been gone.

(Long enough, now.)

The old door is no match for Hal’s strength though, and he carefully steps across the rotten threshold, drawing Alex in behind him. She takes a long, deep breath, surveying her surroundings, and smiles. 

The piano is still there.

She sits at the old instrument, reverence in her fingers, and he leans against the frame to listen to her play. Her fingers rest gently against the keys and Hal’s eyes slide shut, waiting for the first note.

(It never comes.)

When he opens them, knowledge deep in his gut, a wind stirs in the empty house, ruffling at his hair.

(“Promise me,” her voice echoes.)

It’s an easy movement, natural and fluid, when he reaches for one of the boards on the windows. The monster scrambles within him, suddenly cognizant, but Hal snaps the board across his knee all the same and tears away a long piece with a jagged end.

“You wouldn’t,” the creature snarls and Hal hesitates. She was just another girl, after all. Just another dead girl.

“Promise me,” the dead girl whispers, and he tastes blood on his lips.

In a sudden, sharp movement, one that leaves no space for courage, Hal drives the stake into his chest and falls to his knees, gasping. The monster howls, too late, and Hal’s head tips back, his hands still clutched around the stake. There is nobody watching, but a vacant smile stretches across his face.

(In an empty room, a burned and blackened stake clatters to the floor.)

“Promise,” a ghost whispers, drifting across the piano keys before the fluttering wind swallows it whole.

_Finis_


End file.
